Fig. 3

Correlation between miRNA target gene prediction and differential expression of predicted targets in A. coluzzii. a) Venn diagram of Pearson correlation between predicted miRNA target genes and their transcript abundance levels as measured by RNAseq. Silencing of the Imd pathway factor Rel2 significantly regulated five miRNAs (Rel2_5miRNAs), silencing the JAK/STAT factor Stat-A regulated four miRNAs (StatA_4miRNAs), and control treatment with LacZ dsRNA regulated two miRNAs (LacZ_2miRNAs)(Additional file 6: Figure S4). Diagram indicates the numbers of in silico predicted target genes whose expression was significantly anti-correlated with the abundance of the miRNAs. b) PCA analysis of the Pearson correlation matrix for the 11 regulated miRNAs and the 336 differentially expressed predicted target genes represented in the Venn diagram. Points indicate genes that were differentially expressed and also predicted as miRNA targets, color of points indicates the treatment that caused the differential gene expression. Predicted target genes filtered for anti-correlation of expression with the miRNAs cluster strongly according to the conditions that generated the expression differences of the miRNA-mRNA target pairs